Today I discovered a brilliant new fusion sport; yoga-gardening.
It's been a few weeks since we've been home with enough vertical time for me to zone out in the garden and pull at my weeds or tie back my tomatoes or prune my rampant honeysuckle.
(actually, I'm embarassed to say that I almost missed the very first brilliant golden blooms of the 'suckle that I planted last year, and the lupins were bloomed and gone and the rosebush half covered in fuschia 'afore I even turned around)
Today I skipped out on the rock-climbing foray to Rattlesnake Point (despite how desperately I've always wanted to check it out) in lieu of some zen time in the garden.
After a decadently creamy lunch of vegetable and cheese korma I ventured out barefoot, with pointy tools in hand and proceeded to climb right into the raised vegetable bed, after a brief inspection of the flower beds for new buds. (the poppies are going to be brilliant in a few short weeks)
As the first pangs of muscles stretching went shooting right into my bum, I realized the position I'd fortuitously chosen to liberate the jalapeno from their choking weedlings. I was standing with my feet firmly planted, arches clenched, knees stock-straight and tensed, bent over in a lovely utanasana, if I say so myself.
I proceeded this way for about half an hour (Mieko and Kitty would be proud!), rose, went inside for a glass of water and shook my legs loose for a bit, and proceeded right back to it. I'd gotten a crowded few feet cleanly done, hand-picked weed-by-weed to their very roots before my bum started aching that familiar ache. (you know the ache, the kind that tells you that if you keep this up you'll never sit to pee again, but no one will care since you rock hard bubblebutt will be elevated halfway up your back)
That's when I got really silly and planted my feet on the ground outside the raised bed, leaned in on my elbows, and spent the next ten minutes pulling the tiniest weed shoots from a modified down-ward dog.
How's that for a brilliant departure from sanity for the morning? I spent an hour doing some of my favourite poses, hard and focused, and discovered how to do the impossible that Mieko was always after me to do -- keep my "head quiet".
Nothing keeps my head quieter than absolute focus on the smallest minutiae of a labour of love. Weeding has got to be my most zen activity possible...
In any case, I wanted to document this moment during my leisure break so that I never forget it. Methinks I suddenly know what my 6am's will look like for the next three months.
Heh. I told you. I've completely lost touch with other peoples' reality and I couldn't be happier.